On the flanks of a volcano, erosion creates a thick lava soil supporting dense native vegetation as against the imported varieties. This includes primitive, tree-sized ferns with blue-tinted green fronds. 0.5 standard gravity enables insectoids to grow large. Tom rests under an abri.
He learns some changed meanings of Anglic words:
"friends" = space raiders;
"to do business" = to attack;
"fish" = squadron leader;
"camarado" = friend;
"to change" = to do business;
"to be enslaved" = to be taken into custody;
"Engineer" = duke or king;
"to seize" = to understand;
"cave" = castle
"to espy" = to see
"togethering" = rendezvous
There might be some more. Poul Anderson had already prepared his readers for such misunderstandings when Roan Tom called an unusual planet a rogue planet and a rogue planet a bandit planet.
(Rogue, meaning sunless, planets play major roles in Satan's World and Ensign Flandry.)
23 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I thought it definitely odd that "to be enslaved" merely meant "to be taken into custody" (temporarily) on Nike.
And how on Terra did CAVE come to mean "castle"? I'm also reminded of how the various states on Nike were called "cavedoms."
Ad astra! Sean
"Cave" would do that because caves (or artificial caverns) would be primary shelters from blast weapons, particularly nuclear ones.
So "cave" would mean "stronghold". ("Bunker" would be an equal candidate.)
Note that the formal Latin term for horse was "equus", a direct descendant of Proto-Indo-European *éḱwos
But the Latin-derived Romance languages like French and Spanish and Italian don't use reflexes of equus.
Instead, they all descend from "caballus", which in Classical Latin is used only by poets.
It turns out that in -colloquial- Latin, "caballus" meant "nag", roughly.
Kaor, Mr Stirling!
Dang! I should have thought of that, CAVERNS or "caves" being used as protection from blast weapons. Which would be esp. urgent during the chaos attending the fall of the Empire.
And modern English still has the Latinate "equine" for things about or relating to horses.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: a lot of Latinate terms in English come from the long reign of -classical, written- Latin as the lingua franca of the educated classes.
The Romance languages have similar additions, but in the main they're descended from "vulgar Latin" -- what the masses of ordinary people actually spoke.
Eg., vulgar Latin was dropping a lot of endings as early as the 1st and 2nd centuries AD.
In my latest book, TO TURN THE TIDE, my protagonists end up in 165 AD.
One of them is named "Arthur". The locals assume this is the Latin name "Artorius" -- which incidentally may well be the source of our "Arthur".
But while they -write- it as Artorius, they -pronounce- it as "Arturio". And they pronounce Marcus and Titus as Marco and Tito, and names ending in -um more or less as uu'.
Only upper-class scholars still use the -us and -um in full; it's a mark of their 'bookish' use of the language.
That shows Latin changing into Italian.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
As always, very interesting comments from you. So, even as early as AD 165 ordinary Latin speakers in the Empire would refer to Marcus Aurelius as "Marco Aurelio," without the "us"
sound. It would be mostly upper class bookish minded people who did that.
Ad astra! Sean
Paul: changing from Latin into proto-Romance, but this was before "Italian" or "French" were distinguishable. The Roman Empire at that time -- and for centuries thereafter -- had a 'dialect chain' of varieties of Vulgar Latin, which had always been different from "Book Latin".
The action of the book takes place in Pannonia (present-day southern Austria, western Hungary and Croatia; that had been Celtic-speaking territory before about 25 BCE, was then conquered by the Romans (mostly in Augustus' time), and in 165 CE was in the process of shifting from Celtic to Latin.
(Aided by the fact that in the early centuries CE, Celtic and Latin were much, much more similar than you'd think by looking at Gaelic or Welsh -- their syntax was strikingly similar. Many of the peculiar features of the remaining Celtic languages came later.)
The area -north- of the Danube had also been Celtic-speaking a century or two before -- the Germanics had conquered it only recently. It was in the process of being linguistically Germanized.
(Shifting to Proto-Germanic, not what we'd think of as 'German'.)
If you look closely, many of the names of "Germanic" tribal leaders in that area in the 100's CE are actually Celtic in origin.
Eg., Prince Ballomar's name combines "Ballo" (limb, arm) and "mar" (great, strong), both Celtic.
Hungary east of the Danube and what's now southeastern Romania both spoke Iranian languages then -- "Sarmatian".
The Slavs weren't anywhere near that part of Europe then; they were still mostly in what's now eastern Poland and Belarus.
Sean: yeah, pretty much. Now, Marcus Aurelius would have pronounced it as spelled, probably.
Roughly the contrast between a deep-rural Texan's way of pronouncing things, and an Oxford Don of Tolkien's day.
There's a Sarmatian character in the book - Sarukê thugatêr Arsaliôn, which means Sarukê daughter of Arsaliôn.
The Sarmatians were direct descendants of the Sintashta-Andronovo culture, the original Indo-Iranians/Indo-Aryans.
They spoke a language related to Old Persian and Sanskrit (and their linguistic descendants) but ancient DNA research has shown they looked like northern Europeans -- the source population was the product of a back-migration of Corded Ware people from what's now Germany and Poland/Belarus eastward through the forest-steppe zone and over the Urals.
One of the characters in the book reflects wryly that the first Proto-Germanic phrases you're likely to learn in this period are things like "slahadau!" and "Dew!".
Which are the imperative tenses of the verbs "to kill" and "die", respectively.
What can I say, linguistics are my hobby... 8-).
That explains it...
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Many thanks for these very interesting comments about linguistics. Yes, an Oxford don and philologist like Tolkien would have spoken and written in the various Germanic languages (and Latin) with scholarly precision while also appreciating how they change over time.
Ad astra! Sean
Incidentally, Roman education was intensely 'linguistic' -- that is, it focused intensely on language, its structure, and how to use it. Much of it was training in public speaking, in rhetoric.
It's also notable that while a lot of Romans knew how to read -- probably pushing 50% of men in urban settings, and lower but surprisingly large in Romanized rural ones -- they didn't do 'silent' reading.
That is, they murmured the words as they read them, and spoke while they wrote.
"Silent" reading was a rare skill, remarked on when it happened.
Another thing that's surprising about Roman life is the many combinations of what look to us like modernity and then suddenly things are primitive.
Eg., if you read Pliny's letters, there's a comment at one point that he'd suffered a blight on the grapes on one of his estates. So far, so primitive.
This comes up in the course of a discussion where it's revealed that he'd -sold- the grapes (for winemaking) before they were harvested.
That is, he let a bunch of contractors bid on the harvest. The winning ones paid him mostly up front, then came in with their own labor and processing equipment, harvested the grapes and made the wine.
This was a standard procedure for that estate, and saved Pliny the trouble of installing his own wine-presses, and engaging the harvest labor.
In this case, he renegotiated the contracts because of the harvest failure, loaning money to the contractors and forgoing some of the payments they owed him.
He didn't have to do that -- but it was to his long-term advantage too, because if they went bankrupt, he wouldn't have as large a selection of contractors to negotiate with -next- year.
This is a much more sophisticated set of economic arrangements than would be present again in Europe before the Modern period.
Once, as a careers adviser, I gave a client some printed information. I was irritated when he started to read it out loud and told him he didn't have to do that. Then I realized that his reading skill was very low and he really did need to read out loud. As a teacher, I was hopeless with low ability pupils.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And I think one reason for the Roman focus on languages, rhetoric, and public speaking was that it would be a help for those who went on to study law and become lawyers.
I have heard of how rare silent reading was. I think one reason for that was that, until not that many centuries ago, books were not written or printed SPACING the words apart. I think reading aloud helped readers to space out the words.
IthinkIrecallreadingofhowST.AugustinewasimpressedbyhowSt.Ambrose,bishopofMilan,readsilently.
Ad astra! Sean
Even when he was standing beside him, he could not hear him reading.
It's also a sign of a basically -oral- culture, when reading also involves speaking.
Incidentally, reading aloud is a good way to detect if you're overwriting a scene. It 'feels' wrong when you read it aloud, and you feel a temptation to skip.
Kaor, Paul and Mr. Stirling!
Paul: That was what you read about St. Augustine and St. Ambrose?
Mr. Stirling: So reading aloud had some benefits?
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
I read somewhere that a monk was surprised that he couldn't hear his brother monk reading even when he was standing right beside him. I can't say which monks we are talking about.
Paul.
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